"I would rather have a boy of mine stand high in his studies than high in athletics, but I would a great deal rather have him show true manliness of character than show either intellectual or physical prowess."
- Theodore Roosevelt

Megachurches appear to be relatively recession-proofWhile one would be wrong to impugn the beliefs of the attendees, there's no escaping the fact that at least some leaders of these churches are using faith to enrich themselves. Some churches are far more "business" than "charity".

Buzzwords are hurting the legitimate public debate about important issuesSays Charlie Brooker: "It's possible to be a patriot without being a bigot, just as it's possible to be a weather forecaster without being a stripper, but if a weather forecaster took her clothes off halfway through a forecast, its fair to say the striptease element of her performance would greatly overshadow any meteorological merit. Still, a lot of people erroneously believe that saying 'I'm a patriot' automatically absolves them from any and all charges of bigotry." Similar problems happen on the left, of course, where the perpetual refrain of "it's for the children" is usually just a cover for telling people what to do and then taxing them for it.

Should the Caribbean try to arrange its own unified government?(Article in Spanish) The many small islands of the region don't have a lot of individual power or sway -- and they're subject to lots of powerful external forces in the world marketplace and in hemispheric politics -- like power struggles between the US and Venezuela. But could the well-led islands unify with the poorly-governed ones and lift the weak up to a higher standard without dragging down the strong?

30 old computer adsA 10-megabyte hard disk once cost $3500. Today, a 10-Mb email attachment is no big deal. The really interesting part is to consider how archaic today's computer-related ads will look in 20 years.

How to prepare for disasters: Plan to get out and to communicateTo all those people who ask, "Why would I want to learn how to send a text message?", here's one answer: During a disaster, phone networks are often overloaded. But text messages take up so little space in the radio spectrum that they can often be delivered when full-fledged calls won't pass. It's like the question, "Why should I learn self-defense?" -- the answer isn't always obvious. But when mob violence breaks out at a music festival, it's too late to try to learn how to defend oneself.

Why we have to give refuge to agricultural pestsNew seeds and new insecticides are so good at obliterating pests that the government requires farmers to set aside "refuge" acreage without those technologies, so that the pests have somewhere to go instead of sticking around and becoming superbugs. On the surface, it seems to make some sense -- the MRSA "superbug" has been a huge problem in the medical sector, brought about by the misapplication of antibiotics. But it's a hassle for farmers to have to set aside the refuge fields. Moreover, we haven't addressed MRSA in hospitals by setting aside "refuge" rooms where it's OK for infections to run rampant.

Google releases version 6 of Chrome browserIt's been two years since they first released the browser, and there's no question that it has improved in several regards -- not the least of which is its stability. It's still not perfect, but Google does employ a clever trick: They pay a meaningful amount of money to people who identify bugs in the software, which incentivizes people to turn over the problems to Google so they can be fixed, rather than letting them sit until they're exploited by crooks. Chrome isn't perfect, but neither are any of the other browsers. And because it's free, smart computer users ought to download it and get familiar with it, since occasionally it's deemed unsafe to use one particular browser or another due to those crooks exploiting vulnerabilities. On a related note, Google is now offering automated inbox prioritization for people who use Gmail, which predicts how interested a user might be in the incoming messages based upon that same user's past actions. Potentially quite handy -- but it also reveals just how valuable information about our e-mail use can be. Whomever controls your inbox also controls a vast amount of information about you.

Censorship just isn't a good idea, periodOfficials are trying to keep bad news off the minds of the 33 miners trapped in Chile, but even though it's well-intentioned, it's a bad policy. They're going to be down there for at least several more weeks -- if not a few months. If you received nothing but syrupy, happy news in that length of time, wouldn't you begin to believe that people were deliberately keeping things from you? And wouldn't that paranoia be worse than having a degree of normalcy in life -- even if that normalcy involves occasional bad news? After all, they're trapped in a mine -- it's not like they won't have a bit of perspective on how important (or not) Tiger Woods's divorce really is. The Iranian government is using a similar chain of reasoning for censoring news about the political opposition there, saying it's bad for the public to hear about those people. It doesn't take forever for people to realize they're being fed a line of nonsense, so why pretend like it's for their own good?

Stephen Hawking thinks gravity initiated the Big BangPeople are trying to spin this as a religious conversion on Hawking's part. The real story is that Hawking is pretty confident that we may have actually cracked the code that explains how the process of the initiation of everything we know came about. People are welcome to adopt whatever explanation for their personal beliefs might be, but it's truly exciting to think that we may be as close as Hawking apparently thinks to having a real, evidentiary basis for drawing the conclusions we do.

Iowa should not delay on installing more median barriersTensed-cable barriers running down the middle of expressways save lives, period. We know that they work, and we know that there are some stretches of road where head-on collisions are unusually common. Of all the investments we could make in infrastructure, adding some of these barriers to high-frequency accident locations should be toward the top.

Does Chinese food leave people hungry shortly after eating?It's certainly a widely-accepted legend, but is it true? And if so, why? This might be one for which science has no firm answer, but there is at least a little bit of evidence in the form of satiety indices, which suggest that some of the major components of Chinese food tend not to satisfy hunger as well as some major components of Western food.